OK, Mr. Field

A Novel

By: Katharine Kilalea

Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith

A mesmerizing debut novel about a concert pianist who fears he is losing his mind

Mr. Field wants a new life, a life cleansed of the old one’s disappointments. A concert pianist on the London scene, his career is upended when the train he is travelling on crashes into the wall at the end of a tunnel. The accident splinters his left wrist, jeopardizing his musical ambitions. On a whim, he uses his compensation pay-out to buy a house he has seen only once in a newspaper photograph, a replica of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye on a stretch of coast outside Cape Town. Together with his wife, Mim, Mr. Field sets out in the hope that the house will make him happier, or at least less unhappy.

But as time passes, the house—which Le Corbusier designed as "a machine for living"—begins to have a disturbing effect on Mr. Field. Its narrow windows educate him in the pleasures of frustrated desire. Its sequence of spaces, which seem to lead toward and away from their destinations at once, mirror his sense of being increasingly cut off from the world and from other people. When his wife inexplicably leaves him, Mr. Field can barely summon the will to search for her. Alone in the decaying house, he finds himself unglued from reality and possessed by a longing for a perverse kind of intimacy.

OK, Mr. Field is a strange and beguiling novel that dwells in the silences between words, in the gaps in conversation, and in the unbridgeable distance between any two people. Through her restless intelligence and precise, musical prose, Katharine Kilalea confidently guides us into new fictional territory.

A lack of consequences

The first third of the book was quite enjoyable, and I particularly liked the passage about Mr. Field attempting to play his piano again. Funny stuff. But then, somewhere about half way through the book, it got dull, the story, that is (the prose remains of the same quality).

[Spoilers]
The main issue for me is the lack of consequences of his actions that Mr. Field chooses to make. Mim just leaves, without any explanation, making this consequence disjointed from the actions leading up to it. If we got to know her better, it could have been perfectly fine, but as it stands, we're left guessing among an infinite pool of possible reasons. So it is less a consequence, and more just an externally imposed event Mr. Field is not directly involved in. He steals a dog, and faces no consequences, he stalks the widow of the architect of his house, and faces no consequences, he drives recklessly, almost killing an old man, and faces no consequences.

Surely, his descent into maddening loneliness, maybe even depression is captured well, but being sad does not mean the world stops working outside of you.

Back to the driving for a second; he drives, aimlessly, left then right, then left again, but somehow ends up going in a circle. To the best of my knowledge, South Africa is not non-euclidean. But perhaps Mr. Field just mixes left and right.